How old is wine, anyway?
Humans first cultivated grapevines to make wine some 8,000 years ago. But our ancestors surely enjoyed fermented grape juice millennia before that.
We’ll probably never know the first time that some brave person tasted the juice that had gathered around a bowl of fruit left in the sun and thought, “Hey! This tastes good!” And shortly after that, “And it makes me happy!”
But we can reasonably assume that it wasn’t long after that before someone else decided that it was a bad thing and sought to ban it.
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Those casual experiments almost certainly took place independently at locations around the globe, throughout the temperate regions where wild grapes will grow. And, for that matter, people tried other fermentable fruits and grains just about everywhere else.
The evolution of wine from a pleasant venture at home to production in vineyards and wineries had to await humankind’s graduation from bands of hunter-gatherers to farmers, and the rise of cities filled with potential customers for farm produce … including wine.
Saperavi, a dark grape grown in the Republic of Georgia, may be the region’s oldest grape variety, according to the publication Georgian Journal.
That probably happened as far back as 8,000 years ago in the South Caucasus region in the Republic of Georgia, according to Dr. Patrick McGovern, a Penn State archaeologist who analyzed stains on ancient cauldrons, shards of pottery, and broken bottles to trace the earliest history of intoxicating beverages. McGovern, who died last August at 80, also famously used pottery shards dating back 9,000 years to a Neolithic village in China that appear to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world: a mix of fermented rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit.
These and other studies seemed to fix the birth of wine grape viticulture and wine production to regions around the Black Sea, from where it quickly spread through the Fertile Crescent to Europe, Egypt, and beyond. That’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s the story you’ll read in just about any wine book or commentary – including this one.
But recent research is offering a broader view of where wine grapes originally came from. In a sweeping genetic study analyzing more than 3,500 wild and cultivated grapevines, an international group of scientists traced the ancestry of modern wine grapes back about 11,000 years to Western Asia. From there, early farmers gradually spread domesticated vines westward across the Mediterranean and into Europe, laying the foundations for the wine cultures that would flourish millennia later.
“Genetic data indicate that 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, grapes grew naturally across the western and central Eurasian continent,” Mark Fischetti and Francisco Franchi wrote in the Oct. 1, 2023 issue of Scientific American. “Roughly 200,000 years ago, a cold, dry, ice-age climate slowly killed off vines in the central Mediterranean Sea region, cleaving vine habitat into two isolated areas: one to the west of the sea (today Portugal, Spain, and France) and one to the east (roughly Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Georgia). Around 56,000 years ago, the eastern region separated again into smaller isolated areas: the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) and western Asia (Israel, Jordan, and Iraq).”
Global climate played a very important role in shaping not only human evolution, but also the evolution of all kinds of plants and crops throughout time,” according to Wei Chen, an evolutionary biologist at Yunnan Agricultural University and an author of the study.
Chen said the latest research also suggested that grapevines were the first plant to be domesticated by humans. If that is the case, grapevines have served as more than just a cultural hallmark for civilization, but a bridge between Neolithic cultures and modern agricultural societies.
Humans first started cultivating grapevines to make wine some 8,000 years ago. How soon after that do you suppose someone else decided that wine was a bad thing and sought to ban it?
Today’s featured wine, Stoller 2023 Dundee Hills Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, offers a beautiful expression of a grape with a long heritage in its own right.
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